I accidentally deleted the whole of my Enterprise Vault ‘Vault Cache’ folder structure this morning. Spring cleaning in the middle of winter, as I was, I thought : “hmmm couple of Gb in there, let’s get rid of that”.

And of course I shift-deleted it, after all I was trying to save space, not sending it to the Recycle Bin.

My question then was .. What happens when I next go in to Outlook? What happens when I do a synchronise of Vault Cache, or one happens automatically.

Well…

The initial problem was that I couldn’t expand the Virtual Vault node in my mailbox (because I had deleted the MDC file).

If I tried to open an archived item, it ended up getting downloaded again from the EV server, and then cached in to a new local .db file as part of a new local content cache.

The status page of the Vault Cache synchronise dialog said there were no vaults available.

The details page of the Vault Cache synchronise dialog said that there was one item in the content cache, but that nothing was set to synchronise. (ie Header Synch shows nothing is synchronising, content cache synch is showing ‘complete’ with 0 items to download, and 1 item in the cache)

If I click on Synchronise, then a new MDC file starts to be built on the client. I then couldn’t get any content cache to download, at least not the ‘old’ stuff. If a bunch of stuff got archived during a scheduled run of the archiving task, then that gets sorted out at the next synchronisation.